"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.

October 01, 2009

Nature Notes: Stacking Wood

Apparently the biweekly "Nature Notes" column that I write for the Lakeville Journal is only available in the print edition today. [More: now readable here with free registration] The LJ switched last week to standard rather than large sized newsprint, slicing two inches off the margin, but that did not affect my article, which those of you who are able to pick up a copy will find in its regular place at the bottom of Page 1. As a service to those who subscribe to the Journal on-line in order to read what usually follows after my "fair use excerpt" of Nature Notes at this blog, here is the piece that ran today in its entirety.

Stacking Woodby Tim Abbott

Stacking
cordwood is the sort of task that for me becomes almost a meditation.
It has just the right mix of physical exertion and mental focus,
translating irregular armloads into satisfying walls, neat and square.
Like putting food by for the winter, it provides a sense of security
and accomplishment, even if the wood was delivered to the house rather than personally felled and split.
However inefficient my fireplace or how much it increases my carbon
footprint, burning wood is not a habit I would gladly relinquish. It
is too deeply ingrained in childhood memory and sense of place.

My
father loved splitting wood, and as children my sister and I thrilled
to accompany him on expeditions into the woods, perched in the trailer
behind the antique tractor. The chainsaw was too much for our tender
ears, so we stayed at a safe distance, making fairy houses in the duff,
while he selected the right trees to fell, limb and buck. The we would
ride back to the house, where Dad would unload the trailer and spend
the afternoon splitting logs. We watched him swing his maul and
listened for the tell-tale ping when the wedge bit through. Then we
would help him move the pile to where he would carefully stack it in
cords, fitting each piece of the puzzle with a careful eye. Whole
weekends might pass this way, and we never tired of it. My own
children have the same attraction to my woodpile and take pride and
delight in helping to stack it in the cellar.

Today the woods of Northwest Connecticut are managed less and less frequently for forest products. If it were not for a renewed interest in
heating with firewood, there would hardly be a market left for our hardwood.
Certainly the real estate value of our woodlands is far greater than
the value of timber. Across southern New England, the number of forest
landowners is rising while the overall forest cover declines: the
result of subdivision and development. As working lands become less
significant to our rural economy, a whole rural knowledge base recedes
as well. While not only foresters and farmers have keen eyes for the
patterns and processes of the natural world and keep the old skills
alive, they and the lands that they manage are at the core of our rural
character.

I watch the living trees as I stack my firewood. I
note the ravages of a wet summer in the blotched and browning leaves.
I see the moss-grown bark of maples and the naked limbs emerging from
their summer drapery. There are fewer insects now as the first frost
approaches, and the smell of woodsmoke instead of cut grass drifts on
the air. I fit each wedge of wood in the growing stack, shifting to a
different face here, placing a horizontal course there, to keep it
level as it rises. Even the odd bits find their place, and all will
serve, until nothing remains but bark on the floor and white ash in the
hearth as Winter turns once more to Spring.